Thomas Edison is the only scientist ever to have been portrayed by two different Hollywood stars, Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy. You don't make it to the silver screen even once unless there's something about your life that strikes a chord in the hearts of the plain people, and Edison definitely filled the bill. The idea of an all-American boy who skipped college to work as a telegraph operator, taught himself science after hours and invented the light bulb and phonograph was (and is) irresistibly appealing to the average middle-class American. " Don't go to college," Edison used to tell young men looking for advice. " Get into a shop and work out your own salvation." Small wonder he remains famous to this day. He is as perfect an American type as Abraham Lincoln -- or Spencer Tracy.
Neil Baldwin, author of " Edison: Inventing the Century," is very much aware of the Edison myth, and takes it seriously. He calls it " a myth we continue to cherish, with good reason." But like most contemporarybiographers, he is no less anxious to strip the myth from the real man: " Here is the contrarian, the publicity hound craving reflection and silence, the solitary thinker who unerringly hired the best, anonymous minds of a generation."
Myth-mulching biographers have two tools at their disposal: scandal and ideology. Edison's life having been notably free of meat on which a " pathographer" (to borrow Joyce Carol Oates' useful term) might feed, Baldwin has chosen instead to crank up the sociopolitical theory machine. As a result, " Edison: Inventing the Century" is two books in one. The first book tells Edison's story straightforwardly and with a good eye for detail. The second is crammed full of jargon-ridden, pseudo-academic sentences that clatter along endlessly and gracelessly: " Nineteenth-century educational philosophers, proudly grounded in republicanism, Protestantism, and capitalism, considered the best schools to be analogous to factories, places where efficiency, manipulation and mastery, promptness and industry, were valued."
Fortunately, it isn't hard to skip the second book and stick to the first one, and it's worth the trouble. " Edison: Inventing the Century" is the first factually reliable popular biography of Edison, and Baldwin contrives to bring his subject to fitful but vivid life. He is especially acute, for example, on the subject of Edison's deafness: " When he became a household name, Edison the capitalist, the 'Wizard,' would receive hundreds of letters from hearing-impaired people all over the world pleading with him to harness his formidable imagination to find a remedy ** for deafness ... These solicitations were routinely ignored, marked in blunt pencil 'No ans.' and passed along to his secretary. Edison refused to surrender what was essentially his passport to the inner world."
It isn't Baldwin's fault that the Edison myth is often more interesting than the prosaic truth. That has a way of happening to even the best biographers, and Baldwin (whose previous books include biographies of Man Ray and William Carlos Williams) is too shrewd a storyteller to let the legendary Wizard of Menlo Park get completely lost in the tiresome shuffle of factual detail. " When the legend becomes fact," as the newspaper editor said to Jimmy Stewart at the end of " The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," " print the legend." To his credit, Neil Baldwin has had the good sense to print both.
Terry Teachout is arts columnist of the New York Daily News and associate editor of The New Dance Review. He is the editor of "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy" (just out from Knopf) and the author of "H. L. Mencken: A Life" (to be published in 1996 by Simon & Schuster).
"Edison: Inventing the Century," by Neil Baldwin. 531 pages. Hyperion. $27.95